NT4, 98 and Mac: what to use for a router?

[chemwiz]

I'm helping out a friend who has a network with an NT4 machine set up for file sharing (as a workgroup, not a domain). He has 2 Mac's, 2 PC's, and a notebook his wife plugs into it. He's paying for 4 IP's now on his cable modem, it's costing him about $50/month extra for it. I want too just put in a broadband router, but will that work with Mac's? Or is it possible to set up NT4 as a router? I know very little about NT and Mac, anyone with knowledge have any ideas? He needs all of them for his business, and the notebook for peaceful coexistence.

 

[Lord Evermore]

You can do it either way. NT4 should be able to work just fine, because it's not really interacting with the Mac in any special way. All it would do is NAT translation so that the other computers are hidden behind it, with the NT4 machine acting as the gateway to the cable modem (really ANY of the computers could be set up to do it), and the NT machine could also be used as a DHCP server. Since those are both standards, not OS-dependent, you can use ANY combination of computer-types on your network. The only time the OS becomes a problem is when you do file/application sharing between different types, and you have to use software to translate between them.

A broadband router like the LinkSys or Netgear is the simplest to set up (since you really could do it just by plugging it in, no configuration necessary most of the time). However using software is cheaper assuming you get free software or use what comes with NT. (Don't use Internet Connection Sharing with Win98SE, it's slow and buggy.)

 

[chemwiz]

Thanks! I was getting kind of confused by some of the terminology, and since I don't know Apple or NT very well I just wasn't sure.